


Survivor

by Badwolf36



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Nogitsune, Nogitsune Trauma, Post-Episode: s03e24 The Divine Move, post 3b
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 16:24:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1694771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Badwolf36/pseuds/Badwolf36
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Noshiko wasn't expecting Stiles to turn up on her doorstep. She also wasn't expecting the things he had to say. But it's nice to know that after more than 900 years she can still be surprised.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survivor

**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted to explore Noshiko and Stiles' interaction from "The Divine Move," so I gave them an excuse to interact again. I hope you enjoy it. Please leave a comment if you do. They are always appreciated.

**Title:** Survivor  
**Fandom:** Teen Wolf  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Characters:** Noshiko Yukimura, Stiles Stilinski, Kira Yukimura  
**Word count:** 3,457  
**Disclaimer:** I do not own Teen Wolf or any related properties.  
**Warnings:** Set at the end of 3B.  
**Summary:** Noshiko wasn't expecting Stiles to turn up on her doorstep. She also wasn't expecting the things he had to say. But it's nice to know that after more than 900 years she can still be surprised.

 

*****************

“Kira isn’t here,” Noshiko Yukimura says upon opening her front door.

“No. She’s…uh…out with Scott,” the pale-skinned young man on her stoop says. He’s clutching a medium-sized cherry wood box and hunching into a light blue hooded sweatshirt that hangs off his thin frame. The November air blowing down the street is just starting to bear the chill of the season, but he’s acting like it’s the dead of winter.

“Neither is my husband.” And he isn’t — he’s out grocery shopping and running other errands. He’d said something about making something special for dinner tonight as he left, and Kira had slipped quickly out the door at the same time and onto Scott McCall’s motorcycle, neatly avoiding the interrogation Noshiko had intended to give her about what the pair of them were up to.

“Why would I…?” The teenager looks confused.

“If you were looking for extra tutoring,” Noshiko clarifies. “I understand all of you missed a lot of class during…” She trails off, but the teenager is already shaking his head as she tries to come up with an adequate description for everything that’s recently happened in Beacon Hills.

“No, I’m…uh…here to see you.”

Noshiko isn’t often surprised (she’s lived too long for that, seen too much for that), but she’s surprised now.

“Why?” She pulls the thick gray knit wrap she’s wearing a little closer around her shoulders. She vaguely wishes that she’d put on one of her old kimonos (although not her oldest. Those are in museums and various private collections) this morning like she’d entertained doing. She has a feeling the familiar silk would have been a comfort. Instead, she’s wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, a pair of black slacks, black socks, and the giraffe-print slippers Kira got her for her birthday two years ago.

She can see the teenager in front of her has a thick black sweater on underneath his hoodie and his dark denim-covered legs are trembling where he stands.

“Never mind,” Noshiko says, stepping aside and waving the teenager forward. “Come in, Stiles.”

The boy gives her a smile as shaky as his body as he steps inside, holding the wooden box out to her.

“Here,” Stiles says quietly. Noshiko gingerly takes the box, noting how the boy’s arms immediately plunge back to his sides, like he doesn’t have the strength to hold them up any longer.

“What’s this?” she asks as she escorts Stiles over to the living room. He rather ungracefully falls down to a sitting position on the middle cushion of their off-white couch, ignoring the love seat. Noshiko takes a seat on his left side with markedly more control, settling the box in her lap and wondering if Stiles even realizes that he’s seeking the comfort of other people by not taking the singular chair.

She lifts the hinged lid of the box to find a small collection of metal jars with clear plastic lids inside. She pulls one of the jars from the box to examine it and finds a white paper label on the side identifying the leaves she can see through the lid as “Organic Jasmine.”

“It’s not magic tea,” Stiles says, and she sees him attempt a small smile out of the corner of her eye. “Although I asked Deaton about that.”

Noshiko makes a mental note to go visit the town’s “veterinarian” soon. It’s obvious he knows far more than he’s telling these kids (and she tries not to feel a pang at the fact that she’s done the same exact thing to her own daughter).

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” she says as she replaces the jar and closes the box. She decides to be blunt. It hasn’t always served her well, but it’s certainly saved her a lot of time over the years. “I still don’t understand what you’re doing here.”

Stiles leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees and his face against his clasped hands. His trembling is more apparent now. Noshiko watches him open and close his mouth a few times, but he fails to form any words.

Eventually, he seals his lips shut in defeat and starts studying her dark wooden coffee table. The piece of furniture looks strange to Noshiko without the Go game that occupied it for weeks, but she hasn’t felt the urge to pull the board out since they packed it away. Casting around for a distraction, Noshiko ends up eying the tea box in her lap.

“Why don’t I make us some of this tea?” she offers. Stiles turns to her with unbridled gratitude in his amber eyes and Noshiko is taken aback by how strongly the boy’s emotions seem to be affecting her.

She stands, gathering the box to her chest, and takes a few steps forward before reaching behind Stiles’ left shoulder and pulling a soft black-and-white knit throw from the back of the couch. She drapes it over his shoulders one-handed before giving him a small, genuine smile.

“Make yourself at home.” Stiles nods jerkily and grips the ends of the throw tight, drawing it in around him. Noshiko nods in return, knowing instinctively that Stiles can’t manage more interaction than that right now.

In the kitchen, she takes the red tetsubin teapot from its spot on the stove and fills it with water from the faucet. She turns on the smaller front gas burner and settles the full kettle atop it. Opening the tea box, she sorts through the selection, twisting off the lids of a few jars to sniff at their contents before settling on a lavender blend.

As the water boils, she busies herself with fetching mugs (she briefly considers the small, traditional cups that match the pot, but she decides Stiles can use all the warmth he can get and that means large mugs) and sugar.

Fetching two tea balls from a drawer, she contemplates teaching Kira how to do a proper tea ceremony. Noshiko knows she’s been neglecting many parts of her daughter’s education about her heritage, both Kitsune and Japanese. She resolves to change that.

There’s a soft whimper from the living room as she starts searching through the cupboards for her matcha whisk, but she ignores it.

 _‘He doesn’t need coddling, Noshiko. It’s not cruelty to withhold comfort. You’re letting him maintain his dignity,’_ she tells herself, but she’s not sure she believes it. After all, she can admit to herself that it’s still hard to look at Stiles and see the face that stole and broke her last tail, that turned the oni, her oni, against her; and that forced her to lay bare all of her sins.

The kettle whistles before her guilt eats through her resolve and she pulls it off the burner, snapping off the stove as she goes.

She carefully scoops some of the leaves into the tea balls with her fingers before closing them up and setting them in the mugs. She pours the boiling water into the mugs to let them steep, then tries not to listen to the sounds coming from the living room, which are infrequent now, but just as rending as they were when they first started.

Five minutes pass in this fashion before she deems the tea done and fishes the tea balls out by their attached chains, dropping them into the sink.

She dumps far too many teaspoons of sugar into both mugs because in more than 900 years she’s never managed to ditch her sweet tooth and she thinks Stiles could use the extra calories. Normally, she’d abhor the thought of obscuring the tea’s natural flavor, but she can’t bring herself to care. She’s finding that’s the case about a lot of things these days. She imagines it’s a side effect of losing her tails.

Noshiko picks up the two mugs and makes her steps heavier than usual as she walks back into the living room. Stiles still starts like a gun has gone off, spine snapping his frame upright abruptly before he starts scrubbing frantically at his face.

When Noshiko offers him the mug, a “Garfield” one that belongs to her husband, she takes the chance to study him. His face now has some blotchy pink color in it, but it only serves to highlight the darkened hollows under his bloodshot eyes. She sits down next to him with her own “#1 Mom” mug.

“Thanks,” he manages, gripping the mug with shaking fingers. He takes a sip before he says, “My mom used to make tea when I was sick. And then I made it for her when she got sick.”

“Oh?”

He hesitates before explaining, “Her brain. Frontotemporal dementia. He…he made me think I…the same…that I had…another trick.”

“And now?” she asks softly, sensing anything loud will spook him.

“They got me a new MRI. Clean.” He takes a large gulp of tea this time, wincing at the obvious burn the hot liquid causes. “There were a lot of tricks.”

“Kitsune and Nogitsune are tricksters,” Noshiko says without inflection. “It’s in our very nature.”

Stiles shudders and starts breathing hard. Noshiko blows across the surface of her tea to stop herself from speaking further.

They sit in uneasy silence, sipping their tea, until Stiles’ breathing evens out again.

Noshiko shifts in her seat then, abandoning her half-full mug of tea on the coffee table. Leaning back into the couch, she looks over and catches sight of the scar in the shape of the kanji for “self” tucked behind Stiles’ ear and the reminder that he _is_ himself, is a normal human teenager, settles her.

“Why did you come to see me, Stiles?” she asks again. “I know it wasn’t just to give me tea, however appreciated that was.”

Stiles sets his own mug, empty, on the coffee table as well before huddling deeper into the throw she gave him earlier. He licks his cracked lips before he finally manages to whisper “I’m sorry for your loss. For Rhys.”

Whatever Noshiko was expecting, it wasn’t that. She abruptly loses her breath.

“What?”

“It used someone you love against you. That’s not right. It wasn’t right for it to do that to you when you asked it to possess you. I’m sorry.”

It doesn’t make sense. Because of her thoughtless moment of rage, dozens of innocent (and guilty, a voice in her head gleefully whispers) people have died. And this boy, this boy apologizing to _her_ , has been at the center of untold suffering. He’s still suffering, will always suffer, because of _her._ Never mind that he and his friends’ sacrifice opened the door for the Nogitsune’s return, because that creature would not have been in the sacred tree if not for her bloodlust and then her desperation.

“Stiles,” she gets out, and the name sounds strangled to her ears.

“I wanted to blame you,” Stiles continues. “For what happened. For what it did with my body. I have memories of twisting a sword into my brother’s body and I can still _taste_ the enjoyment that thing got from pulling the pain out of him. But my dad, my friends, they keep telling me it’s not my fault. That what the Nogitsune did wasn’t my fault, even though I was the one who let it in, who let it control me. And I thought about that for a long time. Tried to convince myself it was true. Tried to convince myself that it wasn’t. “

“And what conclusion did you come to?” Noshiko asks, voice still somewhat breathy. She finds one of her hands has fisted in her wrap without her consent.

Stiles scrubs at the kanji behind his ear before turning to look at her. The smile he gives her is as unstable as she feels.

“I still don’t know. But I figured that you might be blaming yourself, too.” He huffs and looks down at his sneakers. “And maybe I wanted a second opinion.”

“Chaos. Strife. Pain. That’s what I prayed for,” Noshiko says, picking up her mug and using the residual warmth in the ceramic to try to chase away the chill in her hands.

“That’s all he wanted,” Stiles whispers, fear thickening his voice.

“I wanted it to possess me so it could carry those out on my enemies,” Noshiko admits, and it feels more shameful telling Stiles than it did her own daughter and her alpha werewolf friend. “But it played on my hatred, twisted it beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I was young, stupidly young. I played at being a teenager for nearly 900 years, thinking that I was so wise, so clever. But I really _was_ a teenager. I was foolish and headstrong and arrogant. And people paid the price for my hubris.”

She chances a glance at Stiles, but he’s still studying his shoes, his hands fisted in the denim over his thighs so hard that his knuckles are discolored.

Noshiko sets her mug down again.

“I decided to grow up. I sacrificed a few tails, abandoned the appearance of a teenager. I traveled. I fell in love, got married. I had Kira. I felt like I had grown, like I had truly changed. But I always kept the Nogitsune in the back of my mind, always kept the Nemeton in my awareness.

“So I felt it when the Nemeton released the Nogitsune, when your actions freed it from its prison.”

She feels Stiles’ flinch through the cushions, but she doesn’t stop. She can’t stop.

“So we came back. It was weak at first, but it grew stronger every day. I sacrificed more tails to summon the oni, just as others before me had done when faced with a Nogitsune.

“When I found out you were the…host, I told your friends to abandon you. Nogitsune possess fully; they invade every part of a host and conquer it.”

“We played Go,” Stiles chokes out, and it sounds like a non sequitur, but Noshiko knows it isn’t.

“Did you finish your game?”

Stiles huffs out something that might have been a laugh in another life.

“I swept all the pieces off the board, and Scott told me it threw me up as a pile of bandages, which I crawled up out of.” He huffs again. “I’m not sure what to even call that.”

Noshiko can’t help but laugh at the absolutely disgusted look on his face. She keeps laughing when his expression shifts to confusion and then cautious pleasure.

“It was definitely a powerful and… _unique_ move,” she finally gets out before sobering. “I told Scott and Kira they should kill you.”

After a moment, Stiles whispers “I wish they had.”

Noshiko slips the fingers of her right hand around the back of Stiles’ neck, gently gripping the chilled flesh there. Stiles tenses beneath her fingers, but doesn’t recoil away from her.

“I am glad they didn’t,” Noshiko says. “What happened to you was…no one should have to deal with what happened to you. But you survived, Stiles.” He turns to look at her, tears gathering in his eyes, which are even more bloodshot than when he arrived. “That _is_ what you did: _survived_.”

“But all those people…” he whispers again, voice so low Noshiko has a feeling she couldn’t have heard him if she wasn’t a kitsune. He lets out a wounded-sounding whine. “If I had just died in that coyote den, if I could have just stayed awake, or if I just would have committed seppuku when it told me to, they…they’d be…”

“Dead,” Noshiko says, squeezing his neck again. “The Nogitsune would have killed them regardless. It wanted chaos and pain and strife and it would have carried it out in another body if you had died. It could have taken Kira or Scott or any of your other friends.”

Stiles buries his face in his hands, body trembling under Noshiko’s grip. She hesitates for a moment before drawing the teenager’s body into her embrace. Stiles slumps against her immediately, sobbing.

“I could take the blame for what happened. So could you. I think you recognize that now. But ultimately, the Nogitsune is responsible for the suffering it caused,” she murmured. “Do you understand that?”

There’s a long pause before she receives a watery “Yes.”

“But do you believe it? You apologized for what happened to Rhys. That wasn’t your fault. That happened a long time before you were born. What the Nogitsune did then, what it just did, was not your fault.” She pauses. “Perhaps it wasn’t mine either.”

Stiles carefully moves up a little, wrapping his arms around Noshiko’s waist and resting his head in her lap. Noshiko rearranges the throw, which had fallen to the side when he moved, so it covers his shoulders and back again. They sit there quietly for a time, Stiles’ sobs tapering off again and Noshiko breathing slowly and evenly until Stiles matches her pace.

Eventually, Stiles sits up, pulling the hood of his sweatshirt forward to wipe away his tears. He looks to be grasping for words, but after a few times of opening his mouth and saying nothing, he stands up. He folds the throw quickly and drapes it once again over the couch’s back. He then turns to her and bows deeply from the waist.

“Arigato, Noshiko-san.”

Bemused, Noshiko smiles at him as he straightens up.

“If you need to speak to me again, feel free to do so. You’re also welcome to come by for a cup of tea.”

Stiles gives her an awkward sort of nod before heading for the front door, opening and closing it carefully behind him.

Noshiko takes a moment to absorb the entire encounter before she picks up the tea mugs and carries them to the kitchen.

The front door opens again as she’s putting the tea chest away in a cupboard.

“Mom?” Kira calls out as she enters the kitchen. “Was that Stiles’ Jeep I just saw down the street? It looked like he was coming from our place.”

Noshiko studies her daughter as she swings her purse onto the kitchen table and shucks her leather jacket onto a kitchen chair, revealing the black-and-white striped shirt beneath. Her cheeks are flushed and her dark hair is pulling out of its braid, so it's obvious Scott at least had the sense to make her wear a helmet on that motorcycle of his. She looks so much like Noshiko did as a teenager that it sometimes hurts just to look at her.

“He brought me tea,” Noshiko says, nudging the box into its new spot in the cupboard. “He’s a very nice, polite young man.”

Kira gives her a strange look as she fetches a Gala apple from the refrigerator.

“That was it?”

Noshiko thinks of Stiles apologizing for Rhys, of him wishing he would have died to spare others, and of him shaking like a leaf as he held out the tea when he first arrived.

She’s been alive for a long time, and young men like that, with the strength to hold up under incredible adversity and tragedy, didn’t come around often.

“That was it,” she says as she turns around. She looks at Kira again, that mirror-like resemblance to her younger self, and this time it makes her smile. That smile turns into a smirk as her daughter’s eyebrows shoot up.

“What?” Kira demands.

Noshiko laughs as she picks up her smartphone and starts Googling Japanese museum exhibits, searching for her favorite kimono (the one with the tiny foxes embroidered into the sky blue silk with silver thread). She’s almost positive it’s somewhere on the West Coast. She’d lost track of it sometime around World War I, but she’s sure it survived.

“Kitsune should be stealthy,” she says, laughing again. “And it’s about time I started teaching you some of the finer points of control. I may not be a thunder kitsune, but I can certainly keep you from frying your lamp. Again.”

Kira huffs in annoyance before abandoning her apple on the kitchen counter in order to come stand behind Noshiko and look at the phone screen from over her shoulder.

“Mom? Why are you looking at museum exhibits when you’re talking about being stealthy?”

Noshiko can’t deny feeling lighter after her conversation with Stiles, so perhaps that’s why she turns to Kira and says, “We’re going shopping at the museum. After all, it’s not really stealing if it was originally mine, right?”

“Mom! You’re not serious. Oh my god, you’re totally serious, aren’t you?”

Noshiko’s still not sure how she feels about guilt and blame and her role in the swath of destruction the Nogitsune cut through Beacon Hills. But she does know that, just like Stiles, she’s a survivor. And right now, that’s enough.

 


End file.
